Is This the Coolest Bike Ever Made?

Across the East River, pedicab pioneer George Bliss is also doing a brisk business at his Hudson Urban Bicycles store in Lower Manhattan. Bliss, a bike builder and activist, once built cargo trikes for gardeners, sculptors, and handymen who wanted to haul their gear with human power.

"Now," he says, "it's the glamour moms."

It was Bliss who first used the term "critical mass," in Ted White's 1992 bike documentary Return of the Scorcher, to describe a volume of bike traffic that is sufficient to make cyclists safe. Back in the '80s, Bliss was building and renting pedicabs in Manhattan when he met and began working with another designer and builder of cargo and passenger bikes. Jan VanderTuin, a former bike racer, had returned to America from a farm in Switzerland, where he'd delivered produce to customers via bicycles. VanderTuin wanted to bring what he would eventually dub Community Supported Agriculture to North America—and he wanted to develop his own human-powered vehicles to make the deliveries.

Now, VanderTuin directs the nonprofit Center for Appropriate Transport (CAT), in Eugene, Oregon. If the name sounds a bit like a sermon, it's not by accident. Indeed, CAT has emerged as cargo biking's megachurch, with VanderTuin as its high priest. Here, in a sprawling complex on Eugene's north side, you get a sense of the possibilities inherent in the brawny side of biking. In addition to a line of human-powered machines that includes hundreds of designs, CAT produces rain gear and bike racks. There's a repair center, a do-it-yourself workspace, educational programs, and the Pedalers Express delivery service.

VanderTuin speaks softly, but with an evangelist's zeal, as he shows me around his shop. Four frame-building apprentices, from as far away as Alaska and New York, are studying the manufacture of cargo bikes. "They're learning CAD, welding, machining, sewing, organic agriculture—everything they need to know to build a business based on principles of social enterprise, sustainability, and appropriate technology," VanderTuin says.

One of the students, Kyle Wiswall, from Brooklyn, tells me that "It's much more than frame building. Yes, I'm going to build a cargo bike from the ground up. But I'll also be taking away the skills to run a shop, make my own clothing, and grow my own food."

VanderTuin dreams of a worldwide "human-powered network" of thousands of cargo-bike frame builders, spreading the seeds of sustainable change. "It just doesn't make sense to build bikes in China and ship them around the world," he says, "when people can build them where they live."

Ross Evans, who pioneered the longtail cargo bike, initially came to a similar conclusion after he went to Latin America and noticed people struggling to carry large loads on conventional bicycles. He developed a bike-extension kit as "a poverty-alleviation tool." Just remove the rear wheel, bolt on the kit, throw on a longer chain, and you have a versatile cargo vehicle that can negotiate the narrow footpaths of the developing world.

As the extension kits evolved into the longtail Xtracycle, Evans eventually abandoned the hope that his design would be knocked off all over Latin America and Africa. "I found that this sort of expertise is disappearing," says Evans. "The reality is that stuff is just made in Asia now. I realized that accessibility is more important than do-it-yourself skills if you're going to change the world."